Catch Me if You Can Release Date: December 25, 2002 Starring: Christopher Walken, James Brolin, Jennifer Garner, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Nathalie Baye, Tom Hanks Directed by: Steven Spielberg
GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW
Early on in Steven Spielberg's new film, Frank W. Abagnale Sr. (Christopher Walken) asks his son, Frank Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), “Why do the Yankees always win?” Not sure why his father is posing the question, since he asks it as the young Frank, posing as Abagnale Sr.'s chauffeur, is holding open the door of a Cadillac for him, Frank Jr. ventures that it's because the Yankees have Mickey Mantle on the team. (The film is quite blissfully set, for the most part, in the early 1960s.) No, his father responds, as sure of anything as he's ever been in his life, “it's because the other team can't take their eyes off the pinstripes.”
Catch Me if You Can pretty much hammers away at this point, as the younger Abagnale, having discovered that he has a natural talent for fooling people, runs away from home rather than accept his beloved parents' failed marriage, and thereafter dons quite a varied array of pinstripes, becoming an accomplished check-forger and hopping around the country in the guise of a Pan Am pilot. So many of Spielberg's protagonists have agonized over the fact that they just don't want to grow up. Abagnale has seemingly found the perfect way out of that life sentence — you don't have to grow up if you don't have to be yourself.
And it is in the exploration of this idea that this wonderful film, written by Jeff Nathanson from a memoir by the real Abagnale, hits its most resonant chords. A supreme autodidact, Abagnale — whose innocence, ingenuity, and almost unwitting charm are beautifully enacted by DiCaprio — is so busy perfecting ways of forging checks that he barely forges a personality, until somebody mentions James Bond to him, after which the kid studies up, gets a few suits made, and turns into such a smooth operator that he can actually get change from a hooker.
Over the course of Abagnale's many high-adrenaline adventures, his work in defrauding banks captures the attention of a very stolid, very smart FBI man, played with typical exemplary discipline by Tom Hanks. Much of Catch's charge as a comedic thriller par excellence comes from the cat-and-mouse game between the two. It's a tribute to Spielberg's gifts as a director of suspense sequences that it doesn't matter that, as in Citizen Kane, the beginning of the film gives away the entire plot (with cheesy TV game show To Tell the Truth standing in for News on the March).
As a possible career pinnacle, Catch's closest analogue is Hitchcock's 1959 North by Northwest. Like that picture, Catch encompasses a summation, a statement, and a bit of a self-send-up, all in the delectable disguise of a light entertainment. And this is a delectable film indeed, from the animated woodcuts of the opening credits to the fairy-tale magic of a Christmas witnessed from an almost ghostly perspective.
Spielberg is only five years younger than Hitchcock was when he made Northwest; and of course, the Master of Suspense followed that movie with a picture that was its tonal opposite, and which revolutionized movies: 1960's Psycho. So as delighted as I am with Catch Me if You Can, I really can't wait to see how Spielberg follows it.
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